Doctor Who Series 6 ☕ “The Rebel Flesh”/”The Almost People”

“Spoilers!”
-Dr. River Song

Yeah, okay — there’s a lot of padding here.  Lots of chasing about or debating the morality of armed conflict from the relative safety of a fortified room, when we know that this is all just killing time until Something Big happens.  Matthew Graham took a lot of heat for writing “Fear Her,” which is not actually a terrible episode.  I rather liked that the monster of that particular week turned out not be a horrible monster; the episode was imaginative and nonsensical.  Perhaps not very tight, but memorable.  Maybe the backlash against that episode is what persuaded Graham to dig deep into Who history and come up with a story that… is strongly reminiscent of the Silurian stories from Pertwee and Smith’s respective first seasons.  I’ll be honest: I wasn’t really looking forward to a two-parter of the Doctor running around crying, “Why can’t we all just get along?!”  That never works out for him.  (“Doctor’s Daughter,” anyone?)  The brilliance of the “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People” is that its moral probing is augmented by that delicious twist at the end of the first episode: the Doctor finding himself literally on both sides of the divide, which an emotional stake in whether or not the characters around him buy into his self-righteous sermons.  On top of all that, the entire thing leads up to yet another stunning twist that underlines and undercuts the (often literal) hand-wringing that preceded it.

Doctor Who Series 6 ☕ “The Doctor’s Wife”

“Spoilers!”
-Dr. River Song

Great casting is when an actor fits his role so perfectly that you feel like you’ve seen that person before — at the grocery store, passing by on the sidewalk — even if you have, in fact, never seen that person before in your life.  As it turns out, I had never seen Adrian Schiller (Uncle), though I felt sure I had.  Then there are the people you’ve seen, but there’s no reason you should remember, like Elizabeth Berrington (Auntie), who has been in several notable films and shows, but of the ones I’d seen, she did not play major roles.  That’s also great casting.  But perhaps the greatest casting — let’s call it Sublime Casting — is when an actor fits his role so perfectly that you feel like you’ve never seen that person before, even if, in fact, you know the person intimately, or have seen them very recently.  As it turns out, I’d seen Suranne Jones not more than a few months ago, when my wife and I watched series 3 of The Sarah Jane Adventures.  She played Mona Lisa, a deliciously batty and malevolent monster-of-the-week that made me sit up and go, “Wow.  What a great villain of the week.”  You’d think that I would recognize someone I had seen so recently, and of whom I’d thought so highly.  Nope.  Instead, Jones gave the best kind of performance in this last week’s episode: the kind that, no matter how many times you watch it, feels like a total revelation.

Doctor Who Series 6 ☕ “The Curse of the Black Spot”

“Spoilers!”
-Dr. River Song

You remember the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, don’t you?  “Please state the nature of your medical emergency.”  It blew my mind that he was the monster of the week in this week’s episode, and that Robert Picardo now looks like Lily Cole.  (His singing voice isn’t bad, either.)  The Doctor — our Doctor — doesn’t get to meet a lot of other doctors in his line of work.  At least, not ones that are as mysterious to him as he is to everyone else.  Certainly not many that are willing and able to burn your face off with a Ha-Do-Ken.  Definitely none that spend their time terrorizing pirates.

Doctor Who Series 6 ☕ “Day of the Moon”

“Spoilers!”
-Dr. River Song

“Okay, kid: here’s where it gets complicated.”  You may remember that as one of the best lines of last season’s finale.  Amy Pond astonishes her younger self (and the viewer) by not only appearing in the Pandorica (where we thought the Doctor was locked up for eternity), but by being alive, when we had seen her get killed in the previous episode.  Steven Moffat plays fast and loose with the rules of closed-loop circular logic; it’s one of his trademarks.  The man loves to exploit the premise of time travel by telling stories the way magicians dazzle crowds with elaborate illusions.  There may be no mystic substance to his gamesmanship, but if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief, he can mesmerize you with no shortage of wonderful tricks.  Of course, the only way smoke and mirrors work is through misdirection: a great illusionist needs to keep an audience on its toes, and Moffat’s preferred method is to structure his stories in such a way that we won’t know what the heck is going on until the very end, and after that, going back and putting the pieces together is almost as much fun as having been bamboozled in the first place.  As I said earlier: it’s like lost, except you know that it’s all going to make sense.  Within limits, at any rate.

Doctor Who Series 6 ☕ “The Impossible Astronaut”

Stetsons are cool. But not as cool as fezzes. Sorry, Professor.

“Spoilers!”
- Dr. River Song

Is it too much to hope that the snippets of the Doctor’s deliberately outrageous escapades throughout human history are just teasers for elements of later stories this season?  The only thing cooler than Steve McQueen (almost) escaping from a WWII prison camp is the Doctor (actually) escaping from a WWII prison camp.  I doubt that even Steven Moffat would be brassy enough to have the Doctor and friends cavort with Laurel and Hardy — not because it wouldn’t be cool, but because he’s probably mindful enough of the contemporary audience to realize that they wouldn’t know who the hell Laurel and Hardy are.  But a throwaway gag like having the Doctor (in a fez, natch) show up in one of their films is a brilliant connection of continuity: the daffy, sardonically tetchy spirit of that comedy duo lingers on into the 21st century in the form of a time traveling alien.